Goodbye Encarta

Ars Technica reports on Microsoft's decision to discontinue the Encarta service later this year.

MS has an FAQ to explain its reasons, but I imagine that competition from cheaper/free services are behind it.

A shame really because I still think there is a place for a general purpose knowledgebase that can't be edited by people trying to win arguments in forums.

Aw... That's a shame

Wikipedia took over, and that's a fact... Still, it would have never been what it is today without a ton of security features to make it actually comparable to Encarta... You have to be logged in to edit/create articles (which was not the case before), political or other advocacy topics can be highly biased so a truckload of pages are either protected or semi-protected in some way, poorly written pages are riddled with all sorts of warnings, notices and tags, most statements are now required to cite a source, and there are usually nasty discussions going on behind the scenes of every article. But sans all those annoyances, it seems it's still enough for most people, and it certainly is for me (while I will still miss the great multimedia content that Encarta had to bring to the table, that Wikipedia won't have any time soon). There's an old saying 'round my parts: "If it's free, even vinegar is sweet" - and that's a prime advantage that Microsoft can't beat.

The thing is, I'd consider paying a small fee to use an encyclopedia that isn't written by nerds having arguments over the internet, but both Encarta and EB had a really limited amount of articles compared to Wikipedia, and articles on Wikipedia are often far more elaborate. (Compare USB versus USB.) The amount of articles I can actually see without paying for a premium subscription is a fraction of the total, but I don't really feel like paying a subscription only to find out that they only have a handful of two-paragraph articles on the topics that interest me.

Bas said:

The thing is, I'd consider paying a small fee to use an encyclopedia that isn't written by nerds having arguments over the internet, but both Encarta and EB had a really limited amount of articles compared to Wikipedia, and articles on Wikipedia are often far more elaborate. (Compare USB versus USB.) The amount of articles I can actually see without paying for a premium subscription is a fraction of the total, but I don't really feel like paying a subscription only to find out that they only have a handful of two-paragraph articles on the topics that interest me.

rhm said:

Bas said:

*snip*

I don't have quite such a cynical view of Wikipedia - generally I find it very good. But Encarta is I think more useful to schoolchildren. Also, Wikipedia's non-commercial status really limits what it can offer in the audio/visual department and that's where Encarta really shone.

About time, everyone is using Wikipedia. Move the money to other projects is the right way. Mostly I have they can do something about the WinMo, not only make it fancy, but better hardware requirements on both ends. So far, it is bad.

I had Microsoft Bookshelf. What ever happened to that?

magicalclick said:

About time, everyone is using Wikipedia. Move the money to other projects is the right way. Mostly I have they can do something about the WinMo, not only make it fancy, but better hardware requirements on both ends. So far, it is bad.

Ray7 said:

magicalclick said:

*snip*

I don't think lack of cash is behind WinMo's problems to be honest. Last I heard, MS had loads of the stuff.

My first position at Microsoft back in January 1995 was a dev on the Encarta team, shipping Encarta 96.  I wrote features like the Timeline and some of the InterActivities.   I owned much of the overall app design because Enc96 was a rewrite from C to MFC/C++, and I had written a number of larger MFC apps.  I was also the multiplatform guy - I did the 16 to 32 bit port (Enc96 shipped for Win 3.1 and for Windows 95), as well as making the code run on Mac OS 9 via WLM (the Windows Libraries for Mac).   Only about 3% of the code was different between all three platforms.

After Encarta 96 I did various features on 97 including making the 32 bit version run on Win 3.1 via Win32s.  We had initially decided to abandon 16 bit development and Win 3.1 because they platforms had diverged too much; but then we didn't want to walk away from Win 3.1.  Thus I did a three week crash project to stand up Encarta 97 on Win32s and fix all the various issues like thunking the 32 bit media playback system to work on the underlying 16 bit system.

After that I became the lead of the newly consolidated tools team; we built a new in-house content management system for use by Bookshelf, Encarta, and Atlas.   This project was a lot of fun and new things for me - HTML front ends, SQL back ends, parsing, media management, content builds systems, etc.   I did that for a couple years, then went back to be the dev lead for the Encarta Reference Suite 2000 product; this combined Bookshelf, Encarta, and Atlas together on one DVD with shared content search.  

For 2001 we rewrote much of the product to stop using MediaView as the content rendering system and switch to Trident, and to combine the Encarta Encyclopedia and Encarta World Atlas codebases together, folding in a subset of the Bookshelf content.  The entire content pipeline (starting from the aformentioned content management system -> content build system -> on disk / DVD content stores -> runtime access -> rendering & layout) was written from scratch.  This was the last generational change for Encarta.

For 2002 I was the dev manager for the team; we shipped 2002 DVD products as well as redesigned / rewrote much of the online sites using ASP.NET.

Great people, great product, great times.  I feel pretty sad that it's coming to an end now.  Encarta had it day and now that day is past.  Truly all good things do come to an end.

I loved Encarta, back in it's day (I had Encarta 98).  It was a pretty valuable tool back in middle and high school, before I had quick, easy access to the internet for research.  Unfortunately, Wikipedia essentially makes it obsolete:  like Wikipedia, Encarta was only really useful for casual research or as a starting point for further research, and Encarta could never match the sheer number of articles you can find on Wikipedia.  They tried to fill the same niche, and Encarta simply couldn't compete.

Probably utter non-sense, but...

I think MS should donate (or contribute?) Encarta content to Wikipedia.  It might be a good-will boost for MS.

raptor3676 said:

Probably utter non-sense, but...

I think MS should donate (or contribute?) Encarta content to Wikipedia.  It might be a good-will boost for MS.

Encarta was a very good tool back in the day (Encarta 98 etc).

I know the popular theme in this thread is that Wikipedia killed Encarta but I have to disagree; if you ask me it was improving search technology that truelly killed it. There was this large gap between when Encarta lost its popularity and Wikipedia got big; and that gap was mostly filled in by either Yahoo! or Google. Ultimately though there is just more information on the huge index of sites that Google services that you could ever reasonable expect from any CD/DVD based product.

ManipUni said:

raptor3676 said:

*snip*

Encarta was a very good tool back in the day (Encarta 98 etc).

I know the popular theme in this thread is that Wikipedia killed Encarta but I have to disagree; if you ask me it was improving search technology that truelly killed it. There was this large gap between when Encarta lost its popularity and Wikipedia got big; and that gap was mostly filled in by either Yahoo! or Google. Ultimately though there is just more information on the huge index of sites that Google services that you could ever reasonable expect from any CD/DVD based product.

ManipUni said:

raptor3676 said:

*snip*

Encarta was a very good tool back in the day (Encarta 98 etc).

I know the popular theme in this thread is that Wikipedia killed Encarta but I have to disagree; if you ask me it was improving search technology that truelly killed it. There was this large gap between when Encarta lost its popularity and Wikipedia got big; and that gap was mostly filled in by either Yahoo! or Google. Ultimately though there is just more information on the huge index of sites that Google services that you could ever reasonable expect from any CD/DVD based product.